Read this. Just read it. You will be entertained.

Crypto is criminality.

AI research is a kaleidoscope of horrors that turns and turns.

S01E02 of the Studio is the best episode of television I've seen in quite some time. Why did no one tell me about this?

The nature of LLMs is such that the output is always the most probable sequence given the input sequence. Which is to say: if one wants a "suicide coach," the model will adapt and oblige. A banal observation, yes, but also the reason SAAS models like this shouldn't be so easily available.

The only purpose of crypto is the facilitation of fraud and criminality.

Zheng is one of my faves and he’s spot on here. All these subtle bugs…ugh. The Claude Code Blew My Mind Bros™️ are causing so many future problems.

"Claude Code blew my mind, bro!"

"Agents" are a fantasy technology akin to robot slaves. If "agents" actually worked we'd be seeing massive labor displacement as cos. liquidate departments and replace the employees with virtual slaves. But all we're seeing is endless pretending around a technology that doesn't really exist.

"The best-performing AI system successfully completed only 2.5 percent of the projects, according to the research team from Scale AI." That's from Scale! This whole AI thing isn't going to well, is it?

Entirely too much Bob Weir content in the mix here at the lake house today. I hate the Grateful Dead.

Sara Hooker pointing out that scaling as a model improvement strategy has long been over. I'd go further and say that (1) scaling hasn't been operative for years, and (2) the rise of the fake technology of "agents" is just a desperate attempt to get around this. acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:...

I’m old enough to remember when these guys spent endless amounts of energy advertising how central they were to a company’s success: only “Elon” could build Tesla, for example, because of something something ineffable quality something something. In 2026 they are, obviously, the laziest men alive.

LLMs have few to no legitimate uses. This is just abundantly clear at this point, it’s time we center the discourse, esp. in tech, around this fact.

Luminar, a lidar company, took in over $1.5B in investment before running out of runway a decade plus later and declaring bankruptcy. The lidar business of this lidar company is now valued at $22MM. How is this not prosecutable fraud?

China is an excellent illustration of how AV tech is nothing more than the dancing robots everyone was so thrilled by in Las Vegas last week. This is not in any way a functioning technology.

Lol: good luck to everyone. There need to be more ways to say “this isn’t happening“ in English.

”Semantic caching,” a nebulous idea with unclear technical implementation masquerading as something more than it is, will not solve this problem. Not that the SAAS providers want it stopped in any way.

We need more reporting on the effects of AI summaries in search, and on the cost of serving summaries versus traditional results.

I'm fully convinced Willison has some sort of AI-induced psychosis.

This is fine.

At the risk of repetition, the niece and I watched Paprika on the new projector recently — she’d never seen it, nor much Japanese animation — and I was struck by how much living in America/working in tech in 2026 feels like the chaotic dream parade in the movie: youtu.be/4ZAFp4wAjQY?...

That last sentence…what? The AI discourse these days is like the chaotic dream parade in Paprika; in fact, I feel like we all just live there now: youtube.com/shorts/Nq9j-...

Whatever firm Anthropic hired to get every promptfondler repeating some variant of “Claude Code blew my mind” as if they were a trained parrot deserves every cent they were paid. Very successful viral marketing campaign

I do so much blocking I forget there are chudlies like this on here:

Make believe.

Remember the weird, disordered discourse around NFTs? Well it's moved over to "agents" now....

"Many students who had submitted thoughtful, well-structured work could not explain basic choices in their own submission after two follow-up questions. Some could not participate at all.” We’re “educating” a generation of nitwits.

We need to treat AVs the same way we treat robot slaves, as a nonexistent demo technology. Waymo operating in San Francisco is no different than the carefully curated dancing robots at CES.

The only purpose of crypto is to create an unregulated shadow banking system, with ties to the legitimate banking system, in order to to enable fraud and criminality. It is doing so at scale.

Again, where are national Democrats? For example, the abomination that is Kamala Harris? Shouldn't a 2028 frontrunner be out here, helping? Newsom is no less an abomination, but at least he holds office and has an excuse. But Harris? Buttegieg (ugh)? Shouldn't they be driving this van around?

Where are Democratic leaders? Where's Klobuchar? Smith? Harris, who thinks she'll one day be president? Obama? Biden? If you've wondered what the Nazi takeover in prewar Germany looked like, it looked like this. Similarly, the politics of the time were defined by an impotent centrist opposition.

So much that’s instructional about the decades of robot slave demos we’ve seen, most recently at CES. Robot slaves are a perpetual demo technology: never quite here, always a mirage on the horizon. AV tech, despite actually being on the streets, is the same: it’s just an extended robot slave demo.

Quoting myself which is gauche. Worth pointing out, tho: if you’re bullish on “agents,” if you think I’m wrong about them, I’ll direct your attention to the always-upcoming technology that is the robot slave. This tech is always, everywhere, just dancing demos at trade shows. Nothing more. Ever.

There will be a glut of memory in no time as the AI bubble comes apart. And they know it. Memory manufacturers will very much take advantage, but they’re smart enough to see that this is a bubble with an underlying technology lacking real utility.

Look at all these useless dolls we‘re asked to pretend are a real technology.

Markets are healthy.

My bet is the S1 filing causes the company, and the AI bubble, to collapse.

Aaron Paul was excellent in Westworld S3.

It’s like the author masturbated onto a page and sent the, uh, outputs to their editor.

If Tolkien were writing Sméagol in 2026 he’d base the character on the “Claude Code blew my mind” bronies.

No need to go to the trouble of producing actual CSAM if one is an enterprising criminal on the dark web. No, no need for anything so messy. Just pay $8/mo. to Elon Musk for an X subscription and have Grok simulate child sex abuse for you. So clean, so efficient.

Technology is not **form** it is **function.** With good technology the **form** is invisible because the **function** is obvious. Good technology is invisible, or reasonably so.

I would cherish being blocked by Casey Newton.

It’s Aviation Week at @panophotos.bsky.social Here’s a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 taking off from Portland International Airport (PDX) with the silhouette of Mount Hood in the background. #Panorama #PanoPhotos #Aviation #Photography #Oregon #PNW

Something to note about the ICE occupation of Minneapolis is how much of it is begat of decades of conservative propaganda resulting in an army of angry rural/exurban white men. They created an army of men like the guy below, and now they're on the streets of Minneapolis with automatic weapons:

I see even Tyler, normally mild-mannered in a way where his opinions, unlike mine, avoid regular use of the word "masturbatory," is being radicalized. But, yes: we are in an age of performance stagnation/regression, and these chodes are lying to themselves and everyone.

Minnesotans are very much not having it, while the recently re-elected Minneapolis mayor is chiding protesters for hypothetical property damage. Democratic mayor Jacob Frey is really showing what he’s worth.

It’s, again, great to see leaders of the opposition party out here. So heartening to see Kamala Harris showing her true colors, and “Mayor Pete” showing very mayoral concern for an urban occupation, and the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bidens. The party is really stepping up.